Lisa Miscione - Twice

Maura Hodge chuckled and the chuckle evolved into a full belly laugh. “You think I’m murdering the husbands of the Ross women?” she said when she’d finished.

Lydia said nothing, just sat with her eyes on Maura, waiting. It took a little more than laughter to rattle Lydia’s cage.

“Look,” Maura said, turning a hard gaze on Lydia, “the Ross family doesn’t even need a curse. They are so fucked up in so many ways that they curse themselves.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Karma, Ms. Strong. Bad karma.”

“But how are they fucked up?” pressed Lydia.

“That’s a question best answered by Eleanor. Only she really knows the answer. The rest of us can only imagine what went on in that house after Eleanor’s husband was killed. Most of us weren’t old enough to remember Eleanor’s father’s murder. But when Jack was killed, in the same house, no less-you can imagine the frenzy, the scandal in this town. For most people, it was as if the Headless Horseman himself had ridden into Haunted. Of course, people never looked at me the same after that, either. As I am the daughter of the daughters of Annabelle Taylor, naturally they believed that I had something to do with it-mystically or otherwise. As if I were sitting in my living room casting spells.”

“And did you have something to do with it?”

“Please,” she said, shifting her girth in the seat and rolling her eyes.

“Do you have daughters, Ms. Hodge?”

“Stillborn,” said Hodge brusquely. “I’ve never been able to carry a child to term.”

Here Lydia saw the anger she’d been looking for-anger and sadness laced with a mammoth disappointment. Always a volatile mix.

“I’m sorry,” Lydia said.

“Maybe it’s for the best. Then this business of the curse will die with me.”

“What do you know about Eleanor’s brother?”

“Most people think he’s dead,” she said, her tone indicating that there was more to come. Maura was silent for a minute, chewing on the end of her pipe. Lydia could see she had something more she wanted to say and was debating whether to continue. The keen desire to gossip was clear in her black eyes.

“Some people say he loved her,” she said finally, her voice lowering a bit. “Not in the way a brother loves a sister. They say it tortured him, drove him mad.”

“What happened to him?”

“I was told his family sent him away. Some people believed he joined the army, but the popular rumor always was that he was sent to an asylum, where he killed himself. And others…” she said, pausing dramatically, “others believe he escaped-either the army or the asylum, depending on who’s telling the story-came back, and killed Eleanor’s husband because he couldn’t stand another man touching her. They say he ran off, leaving her to take the rap to punish her for not loving him.”

She shook her head. “But I never believed that. Paul was a quiet boy, gentle, maybe even a bit on the slow side. He didn’t have it in him. Just more stories for the bored little minds in this town.”

Lydia was quiet.

“He was the only one of them who wasn’t rotten at the core,” Maura said, looking off over Lydia’s head. She opened her mouth again, then clamped it shut as though to keep trapped whatever was about to escape. Her face grew harder and she looked at Lydia. Lydia could sense that they’d outworn their dubious welcome, but she pressed on.

“So who do you think is killing the husbands of the Ross women?”

A smile at once mocking and victorious spread across her face. “Well, it’s always been my hope that it is Annabelle Taylor herself, come back from the grave to do the job.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in curses,” said Lydia, fighting a chill that had raised goose bumps on her arms.

“I don’t,” she said, expressing streams of smoke from her nostrils like a dragon. “But I never said I didn’t believe in ghosts.”

Sitting quietly on the couch, sunlight streaming in from the large window overlooking Fifth Avenue, Lola and Nathaniel Stratton-Ross looked less like children than they did tiny adults. But they were children and interviewing them was a delicate matter. It had occurred to Ford on the way back from Haunted that maybe he didn’t have the finesse, the delicacy it might require. He didn’t want to fuck it up, so he put in a call to a woman he knew, a child psychologist by the name of Irma Fox.

He and Irma had worked together a couple of times in the past five years. Most recently when his only witness to a double homicide was the six-year-old son of one of the victims. He remembered Nicholas Warren as he’d found him that night, in his Toy Story pajamas, holding tight to a wilted stuffed dog, freckled with blood splatter.

They’d found him crouched in the bedroom closet, where he’d clearly had a front-row seat as his father and his new stepmother were shot to death while they slept in their bed. He told Ford that night that he’d come to his father’s room to wake him after a bad dream but hid in the closet when he heard something on the stairs. He’d not closed the door, he said, but he’d covered his eyes, so he hadn’t seen anything. Ford knew that Nicholas had seen it all and believed he could identify the killer. But he wanted the information without traumatizing the kid further.

It took Irma to bring Nicholas to a place where he was able to reveal the truth about that night. After two hours behind closed doors with Irma, Nicholas revealed that he’d let his mother into the house that night, as he’d promised her he would. And that she’d killed his father and his father’s new wife. “So that I could live with just Mommy again.” Nicholas’s mom was doing two consecutive life sentences and Nicholas was living with his aunt and uncle in a Brooklyn Heights townhouse. Ford hoped the kid was getting some good therapy and didn’t wind up on the FBI’s most wanted list sometime in the future.

Irma had a way about her and everyone responded to it, not just children. She was a careful person, careful with her words, her tones. She had a way of focusing all her attention on you when you talked, a way of turning her warm green eyes on you with such understanding, compassion, respect, that you just couldn’t help but pour out your soul into her hands. Ford knew this truth about her well, having confessed more to her over the years than he had to his own wife.

She was pretty, not beautiful, with a kind face, her skin smooth and pink like a peach. She was small but not what he’d call thin, with a motherly fullness about her breasts and hips. She was always well dressed but was not exactly what he’d call stylish. It was as if she’d been carefully constructed to be pleasing without being threatening. As if she wanted people never to notice her so much that they forgot about themselves.

He called her from the car and by the time he pulled up in front of her Central Park West office, she’d cleared her afternoon for him. She owed him a favor big time. He’d managed to get her eighteen-year-old off the hook on a DUI that was going to cost him his license and possibly some jail time, and into a special AA program instead. Shrinks’ kids were always the most fucked up, he’d noticed.

There were some small fireworks upon their arrival at the Waldorf suite when Irma insisted that she speak to the children alone, without Eleanor and without the attorney present. She did agree to a video camera, so that they could all watch on a closed-circuit monitor from another room. It took a while before a uniform showed up with the equipment.

As the interview began, Piselli searched the children’s room in the suite, while Detective Malone was back at the crime scene, working their bedrooms. Ford felt confident that something was going to turn up, one way or another. Either that or he was going to lose his job. Eleanor Ross was pissed and she wasn’t going to be quiet about it. He could feel her eyes boring into his temple as Irma introduced herself to Lola and Nathaniel, as they watched on the small black-and-white monitor.